SuperBowl: I'm Glad the USA doesn't Love Soccer

So the Superbowl happened yesterday, with all the fanfare, hype, and overpriced advertising space. And Madonna something something and OMIGOSH A MIDDLE FINGER and something something of ALL TIME EVER! SERIOUSLY! Thirty seconds after the game has ended is perspective enough to make all-time statements, don't you know. And I'm glad. Glad it's over... but glad mostly that the good old USA gives such a great deal of damn about The Superbowl, and thereby leaves the FIFA World Cup for the rest of the world to enjoy. And I hope it stays that way! To all my American readers, real or imagined: enjoy your American football. And back up off REAL football (what you call Soccer). Please leave it to the rest of the world, and if you ever feel like taking up pro soccer as a new sports thing, kindly re-watch Michael Jackson's 1993 Superbowl halftime show, and forget whatever you were just thinking.

American Football is a pretty good game, all-told. It's an interesting exercise in cooperation of different role-players, a fantastic combination of power, brute strength, and finesse, and only hockey, and perhaps rugby, excels it in its ability to combine a sustained exhibition of human athletic potential with the real danger of deadly violence. Its regimented player roles and its tradition of marching band music echoes American military culture, its glamor positions (quarterback, running back) allow for fantasies of glory and spectacle, while its hierarchical nature reminds America's underclass that somebody's gotta block for the quarterback, and somebody's gotta polish fingernails for minimum wage in order for America's billionaires to become as rich as they have. It's the quintessential American sport.

But here's what Football isn't: egalitarian. And I'm not just talking about the way the Quarterbacks and Running Backs get all the glory, I'm talking about the way you NEED to be middle-class or better to become good at it. You know why? 

'cause somebody's gotta pay for all those pads, before you even get started. And replace them every time you grow.

The only worse sport is ice hockey, where you need to buy all those pads, PLUS skates, PLUS rent ice time at a rink somewhere (unless you live in Minnesota or Saskatchewan, and lakes still actually freeze over where you are).

You can play flag football, two hand touch, or street hockey, yes, but if you want to go anywhere at all in an organized way, somebody's going to have to bite down and swallow that equipment outlay. Because of this American Football will always shut out people below a certain income threshold. Because of this (and climate), Ice Hockey also will never be popular outside of wealthy, northern hemisphere countries.

USA even already has a more egalitarian major sport: basketball, which only requires a ball, and maybe a hoop (which is pretty cheap, and can be found in every playground) and the NBA is the most Youtube-friendly, starry-eyed-dreams-of-big-paychecks sport in the USA, perhaps the world...

Youtube Friendly.

So stay away from soccer, would you, America?

American Kids: dream of this:

not this.

Thanks.

The rest of the world deserves soccer to be theirs. Deserves to have the USA and its hyper-saturated sports media stay out of it. To enjoy it without you. To shake their heads when you talk about "real football" as if the oval ball version is it. To nod patiently when you talk about how you're trying to "get" soccer.

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Why does the world deserve soccer to be theirs, to enjoy it without inviting the USA to the party? 

The first reason: The brilliance of soccer/REAL football [soccer from now on; we Canadians call it that, too], and the reason it will always be the world's most popular sport: all you need to play soccer is four objects to be your goalposts, and one thing that's generally round, and small and light enough to move it around with your feet. And that's it. A ball of duct tape or tied together rags will do if you can't afford a FIFA regulation football. And with those things, the poorest kid in the slum of the poorest country can dream of being a world football star. Because ANYBODY can get started in soccer with a minimal outlay, countries that are nowhere near the OECD and the "first world" can be legitimate threats to do some damage in international soccer competitions in a way that they NEVER will in American football or hockey. In turn, these poor kids who made good set their home countries aflame with passion for the sport, and their team, and inspire more kids to bat around a ball in a nearby playground. 

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Why horn in on that, you big rich meanies?

The second reason: I just don't think a country that has passionate followings for every college sport, NFL, NBA, MLB, Nascar, and NHL, deserves to take a run at soccer as well. Every few years, the sports websites write a few "Here comes soccer" articles, and US Women's soccer is a serious contender in every international tournament, but if the US wins the FIFA World Cup, with so much else on the sports calendar, the reaction of many Americans' will be "Sweet! Is Nascar on?" If South Korea won the FIFA world cup, you'd hear about it from anyone who witnessed it, for twenty, maybe forty years after. Ask a Brit the last year that England won the World Cup of Soccer. Most of them will know. Ask any over 45 what they think about the England/Argentina game in '86, and learn some new curse words. Ask a Korean where they were for the Korea-Italy game in 2002. Ask people from France where they were in 1998, or a Dutchman old enough to remember the 70s what it's like to have lost the final three times now.

Sorry to remind you of this, my English readers.

Because yeah, there are countries where other sports mean more to the people than soccer means to them -- India and Pakistan have cricket, New Zealand and Australia, and probably South Africa, have  rugby (I haven't asked any Indians, Pakistani, Kiwis, Aussies or South Africans, but it seems that way from here - please correct me if I'm wrong, and there's another sport you care about more - or if soccer's it there, too), Japan and Cuba and a bunch of other Central American countries probably care more about baseball, sure... but if you look at the number of soccer-mad nations, I think it's fair to say that in the aggregate, soccer means more, to more nations, than any other sport in the world.

And that's why I'm glad it's not also the top sport in the USA.

We've seen that if you throw enough money into sports programs, it's possible to become dominant: 

If we compare China's medal totals in the olympics: once China decided to go for a little national prestige by investing in its Olympic team, it went from "Did not participate" to first overall in the 2008 summer games. 

Meanwhile, once the Russian government had other things to care about than engaging in pissing contests with the USA, they went from first overall in Lillehammer (last time in a long string of first or second overall finishes, summer AND winter games) to 11th in Vancouver.

If USA became soccer mad, and invested as much in promoting and developing soccer talent as it does in developing talent in other areas, between its huge population base (talent pool) and the amount it invests in sports, the USA would get itself somewhere in the top ten, maybe top five, year after year.

But I'm glad it doesn't. I'm glad top US athletes try to become wide receivers, quarterbacks, running backs, shooting guards and power forwards, and to a lesser degree, pitchers outfielders and shortstops, rather than having all America's world-class athletes wreaking havoc in the world's midfields, backfields and goal lines. 

What would it take for Soccer to take over the North American sports horizon? 

Well, this is why I think we can rest safe: for the USA sports media to be electrified by soccer, they'd have to see the world's best players, playing awesome games, live on prime-time US TV, but thanks to the mostly European time zones of games involving the world's most competitive teams, and most thrilling players, that's just not going to happen for now. As it is, US soccer fans have to stay up late, or wake up early, or miss work, to catch the world's best soccer: these are things a dedicated fan happily does, but a marginal fan won't. This means there's a pretty low chance that world-class soccer will start catching channel-flippers at times when they're ready and primed to have a cool sports experience. This is why soccer is popular in North America right up to the college level, and then drops off, as North American soccer stars funnel towards the north american sports that have more lucrative professional leagues... or get recruited overseas, where they have a harder time inspiring other kids from their hometown to get into soccer: momentum fails to build.

source - this is what happens to North American soccer stars:

If the world's best soccer players started coming to the USA, and playing for US teams, it might catch on: superstar power works in the North American sports market. Look how Wayne Gretzky's move to LA changed things for the popularity of the NHL in the '90s. But right now, the calibre of the US teams, and the kind of economics they deal with, make signing a Messi or Ronaldo, in his prime, to a US Soccer club, an fiscal impossibility. It didn't work with Pele in the 70s, a washed-up David Beckham hasn't, and won't, do it, and if a player like Messi DID take a huge paycheck to sign with a US team, he'd be excoriated even more than Alex Rodruigez was when he took the money and signed for the non-contending Texas Rangers.

Secondly: too many 0-0 or 1-1 draws. The two most popular sports in the USA right now are sports where scores like 21-32, or 93-101 are considered completely normal games. Even the NHL has changed its rules to try and increase scoring, and give fans an outcome for every game, and more 4-3 games instead of 2-1 games, even if it's a shootout win or loss. The rest of the world would cry foul to the high heavens if FIFA suggested changing soccer's rules in order to win over American philistines who don't see the beauty in a 0-0 draw, who don't appreciate a 1-0 win with no shots on goal allowed as a thrilling and utter rout.

Thirdly: the flopping. And honestly, this is why soccer will probably never beat ice hockey on my list of "Sports I enjoy watching."

 Look at NFL football and NHL Hockey. North American sports fans, for the most part, respect players who take a solid hip check and keep moving, who shake off a tackle, who play hurt, and who don't pull dramatic waterworks in order to try and get a referee's whistle.

As long as the above funny commercial hits anywhere close to the mark, I'd say the brutal, glorious chaos of rugby has a better chance of becoming a major US sport than soccer. (And for that matter... if there were a battle royale between ten players of each team sport, I'd put my money on Team Rugby to come out on top, after a challenge from a group of hockey players who looked great at first, but got winded after they realized there were no line changes.)

However... the television broadcast rights for World Cup finals keeps spiraling, as the potential audiences reach heady highs -- the next World Cup Finals might reach 40 billion viewers or more (that's by some people watching more than one game), and advertising revenues for the FIFA world cup will likely surpass the ten billion dollars mark in the not-too-far-future. With all that money on the table, and many of the world's richest advertisers and the world's most lucrative sports market still being American based, my guard remains up, despite all the reasons I've listed not to worry... and it always will.

Girls Generation on Letterman (소녀시대 on 레터맨)

Updated:
Must read post by The Metropolitician, who isn't sold on Kpop making it in America.
Rebecca at A Blog Abroad points out that while people are talking about Asia-Asian acts making it in America, we're still waiting for Asian-American artists to get the recognition they deserve.
also at Nanoomi.net.


A few notes:
1. Letterman seems blown away at the end. And yeah, they did a pretty great performance.
2. They really downplayed the Aegyo (but you have to: that just won't work in America)
3. I agree with the people who say this ISN'T Girls' Generation's best song.
4. The way the English lyrics to the song fit with the music, it's pretty clear the song was written in Korean.
5. They KILLED on the dancing parts. For comparison, here's the Korean version of the video.



 I still think Gee was SNSD's greatest song, their best video, and probably the encapsulation of... not just everything Girls Generation is, and the best they can be, but everything the current K-pop model brings to the table, and everything that makes boy band/girl band Kpop. If an human from 8000 years in the future asked me to explain Kpop in one video, Gee would be it.

 Like it or hate it, this IS Kpop:

 

 Put your own reactions to the Letterman performance in the comments.

While I'm impressed that they scored a Letterman gig, and they did a pretty good job, I'm still sticking with my old view that, given what it takes to make it in the US market, 2NE1 and IU are the two groups that have the best shot at making it in the USA... but for more reading, here's my piece on why NO Korean group can conquer america anymore.

And some other Korean music that I think deserves a look.

Dan Deacon, January 28 Concert; Still Blissed Out

So I managed to get out of the house on Saturday night to see one of the most singular artists out there right now, and one of my favorites: Dan Deacon.


There's music that's good to get people dancing at parties -- I always thought The Chemical Brothers' were good for that. And there's bliss-out music -- sometimes that's the same stuff.

And there's music that's musically dull, but gets asses shaking, and because people feel good when their asses shake, it may lead to bliss-out-like states (though it's more thanks to the atmosphere than to the music itself). I always thought Black Eyed Peas' Let's Get Retarded was a good example of that. And there's simply "Jump up and down" music. All of these play well at dance parties.

But if, instead of humans gathering for a dance party, the musical instruments grew hands and feet, and gathered somewhere to have a party, and maybe got high first... Dan Deacon is how I imagine that party would sound.

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Dan Deacon did a show last Saturday night, and I went, and boy I'm glad I did. I like writing about bliss-outs, and I don't know why, but dance and house music are some of the most bliss-out prone styles out there, when you share it with a room of two or five-hundred people. A few of the tallest joys I've experienced in shared moments (the romance between me and wifeoseyo aside) have been dancing to techno-ish music.

And Dan Deacon is a genius in that realm. He takes loops and electronic squeals and shapes them into journeys that get more fun, the louder you play them. And then suddenly the electronic squeals are singing words: my buddy Yujin (from Yujin is Huge) joined me for the show, and as I struggled to describe Dan Deacon, he said, "So it's like Fantasia had a dance party"... if memory serves. I was several beers deep by then. The first three times I listened to Dan Deacon's albums, I didn't get them. Before deleting them off my hard drive, on a whim, I cranked the volume... and I got it. Now I love it, but I have to warn you not to listen to Dan Deacon while driving: you'll speed.

But to avoid making his show just about him and the musics he can make, Dan Deacon spoke to the crowd, and worked a lot to get the crowd as involved in the music as he could. He regularly cleared a circle in the dance floor, and asked the audience to do funny games or activities that would get everyone doing the same thing.

Some were silly, some were awesome, but all of them increased the feeling of connection with the music, with the artist, and with the rest of the crowd. This was his goal, I'm sure, and it took the concert to a whole other level:
(picture from the opening act)


I've been to an Arcade Fire concert where they left the stadium through the crowd in Vancouver, and that was awesome, but this was something else, and the intimacy of sharing a bliss-out was an experience I hadn't had.

He asked the entire crowd to follow this girl in the beige jacket, who'd won the right to lead the dance in a contest on his website.


During the last song of the show -- the encore -- you can see how he and the audience are just as in tune with the music, and each other.


The last song -- a new track called "USA" ended (not seen here: sometimes I put my camera away and just enjoy stuff) with a progression of warm chords that brought the high of the night down into a mellow sharing, everyone around Dan Deacon moving together and bobbing their heads in something I can only call communion. Joy can be shared, bliss and art can be experienced together (with each other, and together with other people), in a way that an isolated dude with an MP3 player on the bus will never understand, until someone gives him a hi-five and pulls him into a tornado of dancing people.



And that's why you should go to a Dan Deacon show... and go for it. Dont' stand by the wall and watch. Jump in. Two days later, I'm still exhilarated.

This picture sums up dance parties in a couple of ways. I like it.


After the show, I thanked him for coming to Seoul, and for his music. He was a cool guy, because he wasn't trying to be cool: he was the guy who lives down the hall in your dorm, except really, really, really good at making music that makes people completely happy.

Weekly Round-up: Links from the Radio Show, and Something Funny

Every Thursday, at 8:30AM, I present a short piece called "Blog Buzz" on TBS English radio 101.3's morning show. In it, I discuss the stories that have been generating buzz, or just catching my interest as something unique, interesting, or worthwhile, on the Korea blogs, during the last (approximate) week.

Here are some of the things I shared this week:

My Two Favorite accounts of Seollal this year were Xweing, a Chinese Malaysian who lives in Busan, reflects on the differences between Lunar new year in Malaysia, and in Korea -- because I'm from a culture that doesn't celebrate Lunar New Year, Korean New Year is basically a family thing, where in Malaysia, there are street parties, decorations and fireworks -- it's a much more public event.

http://xweing.blogspot.com/2012/01/celebrating-cny-in-korea.html 

There's a wistfulness here, kind of like the writings Western expats have when they write about Korean Christmas, that you don't get from Western writers talking about Korean New Year, and it's very interesting. Western expats write about Korean Lunar New Year with more curiosity, because it's new to us, so Xweing's perspective is refreshing.

If I Had A Minute To Spare has a New Years account that seems more familiar to western expats, about visting his wife's family in Gangwon-do. 

Ask A Korean continued his series on Suicide in Korea with part four: worth reading, and a reminder that saying "Korea has a suicide culture" and leaving it at that is an intellectually lazy cop-out: observing a cultural phenomenon insists we ask, "How did the culture get this way?" --there's still work to be done. Especially in Korea's case, where in the early '80s, Korea's suicide rate was one of the world's lowest.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2012/01/suicide-in-korea-series-iv-how-suicide.html

What should you do this weekend?

If I had to choose only one thing Chris in South Korea has ever made, to be linked, spread, and shared, this would be it. The entertaining and helpful flowchart "What to do this weekend?" (a polished final version of one he made a little while ago) asks a bunch of simple questions that guide you towards a host of sights and activities to try or see all around Korea. Good weather? Bad weather? Flush with cash? Broke? Wanna live it up? Wanna take it easy? Tired of palaces and temples? There's something for you. It's Seoul-centric -- Going to Daegu or Busan are options on the "Get out of town" side, but it's interesting, and if you try to do every single activity on the list, you'll have a frantic year (or two) in Korea, but come away having had a pretty darn good experience of the country.

Give it a look! Bookmark it, link it, share it, and refer to it.

Last One:

Finally, we didn't have time to cover it on air, last week or this, but I'd like to send you to check out Charles Montgomery's great piece on the problems (he's had) with Korean self-study. It's an entertaining account of the circular "new book/tail off/forget what I've learned" cycle. The article ends with a good argument for getting into formal classes.

Interestingly, it's hosted as a guest post on the blog of Hanguk Drama, whose author is a self-taught Korean speaker, and has managed to find a method or motivation Mr. Monty didn't. Go read it here.

A couple more:
These weren't on the radio, of course, but Stephen Colbert's interview of "Where The Wild Things Are" author Maurice Sendak is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Part 1:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Part 2:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Source

And... I've been on a Tom Waits kick lately. He's probably my favorite singer... and that's some rare air up there... and he's made about ten albums I'll listen to without even thinking about hitting the "Skip" button... and that's hard to do. Offhand, I can only think of two or three other artists who have made more than two albums during which I'd never hit "Skip"

Maybe some day I'll blog a list of albums I listen to without ever hitting "Skip," but not today.

Today, here's a list of Tom Waits' albums, ranked from worst to best, and I'd recommend any of the top ten to you, if you love music that takes you on a journey, and a well-written song.

Baby News!

Not mine, though. Go to Ms. Lee To Be's blog and congratulate her on the arrival of her little one.

While you're there, browse her archives for some very insightful posts on the Korean pediatric hospital/doctor/care system.

YAY!